Exploring LGBTQ+ history at National Trust places

Why does LGBTQ+ heritage matter?

The influence of queer people on Britain’s social, cultural, intellectual, and economic spheres resonates across time and space – LGBTQ+ heritage is everywhere. Yet stories about Britain’s national and cultural heritage tend to reflect a ‘heterosexual past’; queer history and heritage has been blighted by the long criminal persecution and moral condemnation of gender and sexual nonconformity.

Identifying LGBTQ+ heritage

‘Heritage’ is broadly about the preservation, commemoration and restoration of a nation’s cultural legacies. LGBTQ+ heritage can therefore refer to the histories of individuals and communities who have been marginalised on the grounds of their ‘alternative’ sexual and/or gender identifications and practices.

Equally, its definition can be expanded to include aspects of art, literature, and architecture whose cultural importance is, in various ways, significantly bound up with the social history of same-sex love and desire, and gender diversity.

Heritage and place

People shape place, and place shapes people. This intertwined relationship between space and society allows a way of understanding how sexually nonconformist attachments were formed in certain places, and how those relationships, past and present, adapt and alter heterosexual understandings of intimacy, family life, friendship, and ways of loving and desiring. Domestic spaces have long afforded privacy and sanctuary to those leading sexually unconventional lives.

Queer heritage finds wide and varied expression in the city. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, London’s Soho district for example, was home to a vivacious underground world of clubs and bars.

Activism, community, resistance

Political activism and campaigning might be considered a kind of heritage, one that is crucial to LGBTQ+ people and their ongoing struggle against legal oppression and social marginalisation.

The 1970s and 1980s saw a particular surge in this activity. Identity-based groups, such as the Gay Liberation Front (formed in October 1970), women’s liberation and black feminist organisations, fostered broad communities of resistance, turning houses, bars, pubs, and queer-based shops into political bases and headquarters.

The rapid rise in HIV/AIDS diagnoses during the latter decades of the 20th and early 21st centuries gave particular momentum to these political battles. A significant part of the preservation of LGBTQ+ heritage is concerned with the commemoration of lives lost and the demystification of the ongoing stigma attached to homosexuality and HIV.

Recovering marginalised histories

Queer heritage is about remembering and, in a way, celebrating, a painful and complicated past, as well as repairing and restoring it. Some narratives of certain LGBTQ+ histories are overt and well-known, while others are more obscure and speculative.

Understanding and foregrounding LGBTQ+ heritage opens up the possibility of recovering those histories and telling the stories of the people of Britain’s queer past on their own terms.

The Queer Heritage and Collections Network

In early 2020, we launched the Queer Heritage and Collections Network (QHCN) as a founding member with English Heritage, Historic England, Historic Royal Palaces and the Research Centre for Museums and Galleries (University of Leicester).

The QHCN aims to share knowledge, skills, expertise and best practice across national and regional heritage sites and collections working with LGBTQ+ histories in the UK.

In March 2021, the QHCN received almost £100k in funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund’s Digital Skills for Heritage initiative, which will support a new digital skills programme for the network.

In July 2021, the QHCN won Best Partnership 2021 at the Museum and Heritage Awards.

About the author

This article contains information written by Adrienne Mortimer from the University of Leeds. Adrienne researches narrative representations of illiteracy and the illiterate subject from the early 19th century to contemporary literature and culture. Her research focuses on the connections between narrative and the formation of socio-sexual identities. She has ongoing interests in queer and gender theory, on which she draws in order to probe the relations between narrative, identity, and ‘queer’ history and heritage.